Sarah Silverman Raises Gender Wage Gap Awareness With Comical Video About the ‘Vagina Tax’

Women will lose roughly half a million dollars during their working careers due to one simple fact, comedian Sarah Silverman explains in a video for the Equal Payback Project: They “own” female genitalia. In other words, men annually make an average of $11,000 more than their female counterparts for doing the same jobs, according to a recent report.

But the candid comic has a solution for those who don’t want to get a sex change and become a “dude,” as Silverman plans to in what The Guardian calls a “provocative” clip. Although the jokes in the YouTube video are indeed suggestive, Silverman’s main goal seems to be to provoke viewers into donating $29,811,746,430,000 to “close the gap,” as the title of the clip suggests.

The idea is to crowdfund the nearly $30 trillion that represents how much the 69 million women in America will lose over their lifetimes to the “Vagina Tax.” And although the number is clearly unfeasible to reach, Silverman assures us that any donations made will go to the National Women’s Law Center, “a bunch of girls” who “fight to get women the money they deserve” by pushing legislation such as the Paycheck Fairness Act and promoting gender equality in a number of other ways.

And as Silverman jokes about undergoing more drastic procedures to get the money she’s been cheated out of, she also tries to give viewers good cause to keep them laughing all the way to the bank.

—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata